After the ceremony, my dad, who is in the Gideon's International (the people who put Bibles in hotels/hospitals/jails/pass out at schools) is handing a New Testament to each of our guests, in memory of my grandfather, who was also a Gideon. We are also making bookmarks to go in them. (Don't have a clue what those will look like yet).

Funny story: So my mom and I were having the discussion about favors. She was insisting that we offer them. I told her with a tight budget that is usually the first thing to go and not many people will miss it. She then told me that she liked the favors she got at my cousin's wedding (May of '08). I said, "Really? What did we get?" She replied, "I don't remember but I liked it." I then said, "They donated to a charity!" (Which is obiviously a very nice gesture, but not something tangible that I think my mom was hoping for us to incorporate into our wedding.) We hope that plenty of food and drink will be enough for our guests. Besides we are thinking that maybe we could do small welcome bags in the hotel rooms.

We are doing crayons for the kiddos. They get two each one orange and one blue. I am going to tie a ribbon around them with a little thank you card. For the adults It will be origami cranes since we are making 1000 of them. Many of them will serve as decoration purposes. We are also trying/ experimenting with plasti dip (liquid plastic that dries and becomes solid) to make them durable. If we can get it to work well consistently the cranes can be used as a Christmas ornament or become a nick nack. Picks are in my bio.

We're having a beach ceremony/DW weekend. For the reception, we are giving out small pails with shell shaped chocolate. I've made kids activity books & crayons. For OOT "bags" we've made fleece blankets with the date and location of the wedding with a couple of other goodies. After thinking about all of this, we probably only needed to do one or the other.

OOOH! After the reception, we're treating everyone to ice cream. Holy Moly! The crazy thing is, this is all on a pretty small budget. Oh well. I'm kind of in love with all of the things we've come up with.

We're doing caramel apples with red caramel (since our main color is red). We're getting them from daffyapple.com since they're the most reasonably priced ones I've found, at about $2 per apple. Should be yummy!